It's tough to get a job at Goldman Sachs if you graduated from a Hong Kong university

Only about 15% of Goldman Sachs’ employees in Hong Kong attended a local university – almost half the figure for HSBC, according to staff online profiles.

We worked out the total number of employees at 10 banks in Hong Kong who currently have profiles on LinkedIn. We then calculated the percentage of employees at each firm who attended five leading Hong Kong universities.

The results in the table below only include people who have public profiles which show their employer and their university. But they provide an indication of the proportion of staff members who studied locally.

As Asia-focused firms with long histories in Hong Kong, it’s not surprising that HSBC and Standard Chartered employ the highest proportion of domestic degree holders.

US investment banks in Hong Kong, by contrast, aren’t renowned for hiring from the city’s local universities.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for example, are among the firms at the foot of the table. They have traditionally recruited Hong Kong and mainland graduates who studied abroad – often at elite universities in the US and Europe – while expatriates still fill some of their managerial ranks.

But international firms are now belatedly stepping up their efforts to hire more Hong Kong-based students, so the percentages below should increase over the next few years.

As we noted last month, J.P. Morgan is running spring and autumn internships which exclusively target local campuses. And more than a fifth of its Hong Kong headcount already has a local degree, according to staff profiles.